THEATRE REVIEW: DEATH OF A SALESMAN
22 Oct'10

JOHN COULBOURN - QMI Agency
Rating: 4 out of 5

Good plays are often defined by their time . A great play is timeless — and Arthur Miller's DEATH OF A SALESMAN is a truly great play. Just how great, in fact, is more than evident in the Soulpepper production that opened Thursday at the Young Centre, directed by Albert Schultz.

Save for a certain precise beauty in the language (tragically fallen from fashion in the past 60 years), the play and its protagonist are very much of today's world. Willy Loman, the man who sits at the heart of this modern tragedy, could be one of the millions of people who today look back on a lifetime of hard work and playing by the rules, and wonder: "What the hell happened."

And when the long-suffering Linda Loman, Willy's wife, insists: "Attention must be paid," there are echoes of the same rage and frustration that's blossomed in today's disaffected electorate, seemingly prepared to throw the baby out with the bath water, hoping for something better. But while the play itself is still hugely powerful — perhaps even more powerful than at any time since it premiered in 1949 — Soulpepper's often-worthy production is impressive on many fronts, though flawed. Reviewed here in it's final preview, it features some truly magnificent performances in its principal roles.

Joseph Ziegler is cast as Willy , the Salesman of title, and, not surprisingly, he is superb, embracing his character's flaws and making them strengths as he careers backwards and forwards in time like some sort of aged and wounded bull elephant looking for a place to die. His Willy may have a skewed vision of the world, but he has played by the rules as he sees them, only to discover in the final act , that the rules have changed. Thanks to Ziegler's performance we not only understand his sense of betrayal, we feel it as well.

As his sons, Biff and Happy, Ari Cohen and Tim Campbell respectively, match Ziegler at almost every turn, throwing themselves into their performances with a fearlessness shot through with both intelligence and pain. As Biff, Cohen skates constantly on the edge of despair, while Campbell brings a deep bravado and sympathy to his portrayal of the hapless Hap.

As Willy's long-suffering wife, Nancy Palk (Ziegler's real-life wife) gives a valid performance too, although her St. Linda of Loman routine wears more than a little thin by the play's end, robbing her character of backbone and her graveside farewell of much of its power.

But while the Loman family springs to vital life on Lorenzo Savoini's cramped but effective set, Schultz is not nearly as effective with the performances he draws from his supporting cast. From William Webster's strangely foppish turn as the ghostly Uncle Ben, through Brendan Wall's oddly contemporary turn as Howard, Willy's brash and self-involved young boss, Schultz seems content to allow fine performances from his principals to serve as support for his supporting cast, making do with good enough, in a work where good enough simply isn't good enough by half. While his pacing is right on the money, one wishes he'd spent a little more time shaping things and not just moving them along.

Still, few can deny that Miller's timeless script triumphs over the often minor missteps in this production. For all that it may not be a perfect production of DEATH OF A SALESMAN, it is nonetheless a DEATH OF A SALESMAN for our time, and when a show like this comes along, attention must be paid.

To borrow a phrase.